Ok so I'm a complete NOOB, so of course ATAPI will be my 1st attempt at self instruction (yes I am a gluttton).

So I have a freshly built 328 and would like to interface to a couple of old CDROM drives using either ATAPI commands via a 40 pin cable and 12v power supply OR a microcontroller (last option) and I can't find a thing on the google machine.

I'm building the RFID cat feeder and would like to simply send a command to pin on the cdrom drives and voila open or close.